In the News

"Too Young for This: Facing Cancer Under 40" appears on the front page of the science section of today's New York Times. (The paper was already atop my monumental not-yet-read pile, so many thanks to Eric for sending me the link.)

It's a good overview of the issues surrounding cancer in twenty- and thirty-somethings, and definitely worth a read. The main thing that struck me, though, was a quote from a woman who was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer at 36. Speaking about younger people, she said, "[C]ancer can be the ultimate form of identity theft, if you let it."

I couldn't agree more. Not just because it tends to become your single defining characteristic, which it can, but because so often it completely upends your life and imposes limitations you never before had to face.

I have written about that phenomenon here before, in too many posts to cite, and I'm sure I will write about it again and again. It's a major theme of this blog, and of my efforts to articulate the struggle between the person I have always been and the one that cancer seems to want me to be.

It was just nice to hear that someone else feels that way, too.